Rumpsringa (now on Netflix) is a German movie about an American Amish man who speaks German and goes to Germany for his [insert title of movie here], a rite of passage that all Amish folk go through as adolescents – and then they marry the same person and stay with them for the rest of their lives, and have children and get way into traditional gender roles. It’s not the freshest concept for a movie, taking a rube out of their comfort zone and dropping them in a sinful, corrupted setting. But maybe, since this is a EUROPEAN movie, it won’t adhere to the same old formula. One can always hope.
RUMSPRINGA: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
The Gist: A prayer circle. Saying goodbye. Jakob (Jonas Holdenrieder) is leaving the Pennsylvania farm to see what life is like outside the Amish bubble. When he’s done, he’ll return and be baptized or he’ll stay and go to college or work at Chipotle or whatever, there are a lot of options, probably more than if he grows out his beard but not his mustache and stays to shuck hay and milk cows. His father hands him the family bible and he gets on a bus and gets on a plane and gets to Berlin and immediately gets into trouble. He helps a pretty young woman into her cab and then realizes she accidentally scooped up his bag with all his belongings and the bible. She’s gone. He’s stranded. Fish out of water. Thrown in the deep end. Culture shocked.
Jakob sees a man wearing a white shirt and suspenders and straw hat and beard/no mustache and assumes he’s Amish. He’s not. He’s Alf (Timur Bartels), a college party bro who apparently has no qualms about cultural appropriation for fashion’s sake. He and his roommate Bo (Rauand Taleb) don’t care about Jakob’s plight at first but they soon take pity on this naif, possibly because Alf thinks being nice to the guy will help him further impress his occasional sex partner Freja (Tijan Marei). And thus the catalyst begins catalyzing: Alf rethinks his facial hair and gets out the razor. Jakob rethinks the concept of sinning. Yin, meet yang.
Alf helps Jakob devise a ludicrous scheme to recover his bag – it involves being an Amish delivery boy on roller skates – which puts our Amish doof at the doorstep of Ina (Gizem Emre), an attractive, highly liberated art gallery curator. (Of course, compared to Jakob, a Tibetan monk might look highly liberated, but never mind.) In turn, Jakob teaches Alf how to use an ax to cut down a tree to make wood for his school architecture project. At first blush, Alf is douche city, all muscle and dontgiveashit, and his expressionless face looks like he was born into profound ennui. Also, money – his dad pays his way and he drives a vintage Mercedes convertible. It doesn’t take a crystal ball to see what’s going to happen here, to see that Alf will help Jakob learn to smoke weed and do sex, and Jakob will help Alf be a thoughtful sensitive guy who maybe wants to commit to a girl (Freja perhaps) instead of just shtoinking them and forgetting them. I’m not saying that actually happens, just assuming, because I think Jakob’s 300-year-old bible says thou shalt not spoileth thine film.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: I dunno, lotsa fishes outta waters in lotsa movies – Coming to America? Encino Man? Crocodile Dundee? I also remember Amish people being in Sex Drive, Witness and Kingpin. (You may also recall the scandalous mid-2010s reality show, Breaking Amish, which centered on some particularly rebellious Amish youth in New York City.)
Performance Worth Watching: Bartels gets the somewhat surprising arc here, convincing us that a bro can have a soul.
Memorable Dialogue: Jakob realizes the flaw in fundamentalism: “I’d also believe in the Lord if I could drive a machine. If I could play a piano. If I could wear pants with a zipper.”
Sex and Skin: A tasteful, artsy sex scene; Alf and Freja maul each other; brief man-butt.
Our Take: Rumspringa takes two hoary old plot templates – fish out of water and buddy comedy – and smooshes them together into a wearisome collection of Amish-guy-drunk-at-a-party scenes that eventually transition into a modestly touching, thoughtful story about unlikely friendship. Jakob’s heavily screenwritten path takes him to many touchstones, from learning how to drive to learning how to (gasp!) unzip a zipper – on a woman’s garment – and then make the beast with two backs with that woman, in a romantic subplot that stretches plausibility somewhat, especially when she yells MENSTRUATION! at him to purposely offend him, and he summons up all his yarbles and yells MENSTRUATION! right back at her to win her heart. At least this movie shows us a fresh, new way for a man to earn his way into a woman’s bed.
The film doesn’t lean too heavily into the crisis-of-faith fodder we might expect it to. Instead, it inserts rom-com cliches into the non-gay bromance, all the way down to the breakup/make up story beat, and a hurried dash to the airport. Director/co-writer Mira Thiel crams a lot of stuff in the movie, including observations about gender dynamics and sexism, while posing questions about the meaning and value of freedom. Rumspringa lightly experiments with formula by not wholly condemning Jakob’s conservative values, which arguably form the foundation of mutual affection between him and Alf. It’s a fair treatment. Being Amish isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, but then again, neither is being an urban Berliner.
Our Call: STREAM IT. Rumspringa shows enough ambition to make it more compelling than most culture-shock movies, but also enough crowd pleasing fodder to render it a light and easy watch.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com.
